Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Fighting spam in comments

I’ve been getting some spam in the comments recently. I must say that since the upgrade to WordPress the amount of spam I am getting has drastically decreased, but it hasn’t disappeared. Fighting spam in comments and trackbacks, it turns out, is yet another area where WordPress rules.

WordPress has some built-in mechanisms for combatting spam, as well as a number of external tools, hacks, and plugins.

For the time being, I have enabled premoderation for comments matching certain words. I have also checked all options except for ‘An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)’, which I don’t want to do at the moment.

Let me know if new settings cause any problems.

Update: This is a quick update to let everyone know that changes helped a lot. I am getting all those comments which used to show up in my “Waiting for approval” queue. I mark them as spam and off they go. WooHoo! :)

Xhtml Friends Network

Xhtml Friends Network (XFN) is yet another area of the blogging world. XFN is a technology that can be used to build human relationships networks. Basically, it is an addition to XHTML standard, which allows to mark URLs with a number of relationships, such as acquaintance level, wheather you’ve met a person or not, if he is a part of your family and wheather you are working with him or not.

The URL marking is really easy, but I wouldn’t have bothered with it, unless WordPress supported it. In fact, I’ve learned about this technology from the WordPress. It supports the XFN by default and provides an excellent management interface in the links administration section.

I have therefor marked all my links in the sidebar with appropriate XFN tags and I have also submitted my site for spidering.

Blogroll separated

My blogroll grew a bit lately and started to slow things down. I’ve decided to move it to a separate page – Blogroll. I’ll keep only a handful of links on the right tab. In case you want to see more, there is always a link to it on the sidebar, as well as in the navigation bar.

If you are wondering how I integrated the blogroll like this into WordPress, here’s how I did it:

  1. Create a separate page in WordPress admin.
  2. Update .htaccess file to properly handle permalinks for the new page.
  3. Install and activate WordPress PHP Exec plugin
  4. Export BlogLines profile via PHP Exec plugin, like so: 
    <phpcode>
<?php
   include ('http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=leonid');
?>
</phpcode>

Note: change ‘leonid’ in the above URL to your BlogLines username.